Speed up your page load times for a better user experience

Any website wants to provide users a great user experience, and a fast site improves overall site quality and increases user satisfaction. Everybody deserves a fast Web experience.

How to accomplish that? I’ll list a variety of factors to make your site zippier, plus useful tips from Yahoo and Google. Apologies: Some of this will be extra geeky! (And note: Make a backup of your site before starting!)

Leverage browser caching

1“Expires headers tell the browser whether a resource on a website needs to be requested from the source or if it can be fetched from the browser’s cache,” CJ Patrick writes. “When you set an expires header for a resource, such as all jpeg images, the browser will store those resources in its cache. The next time the visitor comes back to the page it will load faster, as the browser will already have those images available.”Continue reading →